Just wondering if anybody managed to get SMP kernel to boot properly on
an old Asus CUV4X-DLS motherboard (older dual P-III)?
I had this problem only with this specific motherboard and 2.6 kernels.
First time couple of years ago. And again today (I've just installed
CentOS4 on a box that used to run RH7.3). Previously those machines
were running Red Hat 7.3 (2.4 kernels), and with 2.4 SMP kernel all
worked fine.
The issue I'm having is that when device driver modules are loaded from
initrd's init script, insmod doesn't wait until each driver it loads is
completely loaded and initialized. It just exits with right away and
init script goes on and starts loading next device driver. It looks
like bang, system loads all of them in parallel. Of course, this
doesn't work really well. Before RAID and SCSI drivers have time to
scan the bus and detect disk drives, vgscan is already done, and of
course it doesn't find any volume groups, since previous device drivers
haven't yet detected any drives. All I can see on console is
interleaved messages from various device drivers intializing with
messages from LVM, followed by kernel panic because it couldn't mount
root file system. All completely out of order. The output on console
looks something like this:
Loading scsi_mod.ko module
Loading sd_mod.ko module
Loading 3w-xxxx.ko module
Loading scsi_transport_spi.ko module
Loading sym53c8xx.ko module
Loading dm-mod.ko module
Loading jbd.ko module
Loading ext3.ko module
Loading dm-mirror.ko module
Loading dm-zero.ko module
Loading dm-snapshot.ko module
Here goes output from loaded modules, in no particular order, all totally
mixed up, couple of lines from 3w-xxxx, then couple of lines from sym53c8xx,
then couple of lines from 3w-xxxx again and so on...
By the time vgscan is run, even the jbd and ext3 modules are not yet
completely loaded in kernel.
If I boot single processor kernel, all is fine. Device drivers are
loaded one by one, insmod waits for device driver to initialize
properly. Just as it should be. The output on console looks like:
Loading scsi_mod.ko module
Loading sd_mod.ko module
Loading 3w-xxxx.ko module
Otuput of 3w-xxxx detecting RAID volumes
Loading scsi_transport_spi.ko module
Loading sym53c8xx.ko module
Output of sym53c8xx detecting SCSI devices
Loading dm-mod.ko module
Loading jbd.ko module
Loading ext3.ko module
Loading dm-mirror.ko module
Loading dm-zero.ko module
Loading dm-snapshot.ko module
The workaround I have to get system to boot using SMP kernel is to
modify init script from initrd, and insert bunch of sleeps after each
insmod to give device driver ehough time to initialize before next
device driver (wich might depend on one or more previous device
drivers) is loaded. This kind of works, but it's just an ugly hack to
hide underlying problem. Of course, there is also this nasty feeling
that something inside kernel doesn't really work well and that other
things might break or that data might get corrupted.
When I was Googling around, I also found suggestion to turn off MPS 1.4
in BIOS, but it made no difference in my case. Of course, turning ACPI
off can't be done on SMP kernel (and system works fine with ACPI using
single-processor kernel).
I'm still not sure if this is problem with kernel (things worked fine
with 2.4 SMP kernels), or some strange bug in (new) insmod executable
that surfaces only when using this particular motherboard.
Anyhow, to conclude this lenghty email... Any success/failure story
with running 2.6 SMP kernel based distro (particuallary CentOS4) on
this motherboard is more than welcome.
--
See Ya' later, alligator!
http://www.8-P.ca/
